Babel's Dawn

Just How Sane Are We?

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” Shakespeare put that line in A Midsummer’s Night Dream, first staged in the 1590s, and I doubt that anyone at the play’s opening thought the idea was new. Thus, a whole book asserting that we mortals do indeed have our foolish side might seem unnecessary. But a series of doubters have appeared since Puck had his laugh, people who insist that, to paraphrase Dr. Pangloss, we mortals are the most rational of all possible species. Now there is an idea that could give both Puck and his audience a hearty laugh. Who, you might demand, argues such nonsense?

From the Mouthes of Babes

Derek Bickerton is an interesting fellow, an odd man out who goes his own way even when he writes his memoirs. Most memoirs are, by definition, accounts of a person’s life. “I was born on a sunny day in the year of our lord 19__.” No such sentence is to be found in Bickerton’s memoirs. He does have a scene in which a driver almost crashes head on into an oncoming car, but this bit of personal recounting is so unusual that it left me wondering how he had happened to put that moment into his book. Bastard Tongues: A trailblazing linguist finds clues to our common humanity in the world’s lowliest languages is an account of “the world lowliest languages” and how they came to be as they are. The memoir side of it appears only in the fact that it describes how the author came to understand pidgin and Creole languages in his fashion. I should think the book will irritate scholars who have a different understanding of the subject. Fortunately, however, I’m not a scholar and I’m in complete agreement with Bickerton on his main theme.

Repressing the Obvious

The repressed dancers' ball. It don't mean a thing when it ain't got that swing.

The story so far: Steven Pinker’s new book The Stuff of Thought argues that the meaning of words is found in the abstract concepts that are either inborn or assembled from inborn concepts (thesis summarized in Pinker’s Anti-Whorfian Hypothesis).  If Pinker is correct, an account of the origin of speech has to include the evolution of a system for translating the abstract concepts into concrete words. But a system for expanding abstract information into true, apt information isn’t plausible (see The Abstract/Concrete Divide). It’s also simpler and more in keeping with human behavior to consider speech as operating at the level of conscious attention rather than unconscious concepts (see Concept or Attention?).

Steven Pinker writes like an extremely gifted novelist who is also terribly repressed. His work is imaginative and energetic, but in the end it boils down to nothing much. We expect more from both science and literature. The problem occurs too often in works of psychology that promise much and then, like hack fiction, collapse in their endings. The author had little to say, after all.

Concept or Attention?

What was the name of that actor in the black hat? Jack ... Jane ... Jawarharlal?

The story so far: Steven Pinker’s new book The Stuff of Thought argues that the meaning of words is found in the abstract concepts that are either inborn or assembled from inborn concepts (thesis summarized in Pinker’s Anti-Whorfian Hypothesis).  If Pinker is correct, an account of the origin of speech has to include the evolution of a system for translating the abstract concepts into concrete words. But a system for expanding abstract information into true, apt information won’t work (see The Abstract/Concrete Divide).

One difference between speech and computer output is the way people revise themselves. “It was a smooth ride …well, not that smooth. In fact at one point we hit a pothole.” Or they correct themselves, “I saw Tom Jackson the other day. I mean Pete Jackson. His name is Pete.” Or they notice something unintended, “I made my fame at that poker game. Ha, fame game. I’m a poet and don’t know it.”

Because of these sorts of changes I completely agree with Pinker’s basic thesis that our thoughts govern our language. Yet these sorts of changes also make me still more doubtful about his claim that these thoughts consist of abstract concepts. The concepts he describes are too close to language to provide a second opinion, so to speak. They are some sort of computational language that generates output in whatever cultural language we happen to speak. Meanwhile, real speakers are struggling to put what they think into the right words. And I know Pinker is familiar with what I’m saying. He writes way too well for his book to be anything close to a first draft.

The Abstract/Concrete Divide

Jumping the Divde. It's not easy to move from an abstract world to a concrete one.

The thesis of Steven Pinker’s new book, The Stuff of Thought, (in stores today, 9/11) is that the words we use are determined by a set of abstract concepts built into the brain. So, for speech to have begun we must have evolved the ability to transform those abstract concepts into concrete words. The trouble is, jumping the abstract/concrete divide from the abstract side of the gap is like building an anti-gravity machine. It contradicts something fundamental.

Pinker's Anti-Whorfian Hypothesis

Stephen Pinker’s new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window on Human Nature will be published this Tuesday, 9/11. The book’s virtues are what any reader of Pinker expects—wit, clarity, and more clarity. For many language mavens the big story is likely to be that Pinker, a one-time member in good standing of the Chomsky school, has broken with its number one doctrine; Pinker places semantics above syntax. I sympathize with that bias, yet the book also has a more regrettable feature that I have also come to expect from Pinker. It tells a story that is hard to credit in the face of how evolution works. And, oh, yes, if his theory of language is correct, this blog’s long focus on the roles of attention, joint attention, and listening have been a waste of time.

Instinct or Invention?

If a boatload of babies washed up on the Galapagos, how would the babies fare?

Christine Kenneally ends her new book The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language by asking a collection of scholars:

If we shipwrecked a boatload of babies on the Galapagos Islands—assuming they had all the food, water, and shelter they needed to survive—would they produce language in any form when they grew up? And if it did, how many individuals would you need for it to take off, what form might it take, and how would it change over the generations?

It is an elaborate way of asking how dependent we are on the chain of elders who passed language on to us when we were small. The question gave me a chuckle because I was asking the same general question in 1970 and could never find anybody, linguist or not, who took it seriously. How times have changed. Kenneally’s score: 11 say yes some sort of language or protolanguage would appear; 2 say no language would appear; 1 says probably not and 1 it depends.

The Language-Ready Brain

Pixar's latest gem reminds us all that humans are not alone in having a sensuous life.

The longest—and most exhausting—portion of Christine Kenneally’s new book, The First Word, looks at the question of what language is. Traditionally the definition has been abstract and axiomatic. Ferdinand de Saussure began modern linguistics by saying, "Language is a structure, a functioning whole in which the different parts are determined by one another." Noam Chomsky had language pegged as the set of sentences generated by its rules. Kenneally has no sympathy for these kinds of dicta. She doesn’t even bother to dismiss them, but she plainly does not believe that language is something that can be abstracted from its speakers and studied like a conic slice on a piece of graph paper. Nor is it a "whole" system. Language in her book is a "suite" of physical abilities that enable us to converse.

Becoming Respectable

There is a new book on speech origins due out this week. It’s Christine Kenneally’s The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language and is likely to be of interest to anybody who cares about this blog, with one caveat. The subtitle tells where the focus lies—not so much on the origin of language itself but the search for the origin. There is more on the dispute over what evolved than on what Homo habilis had to say. Since there is hardly anything in the story of speech evolution that can be classed as settled knowledge, the approach makes sense. But the reader should know going in that the book tells a story of modern science rather than the pathway to ourselves.

On Human Nature

I’m not recommending that others follow in my footsteps, but I saw a collection of old pieces published under the title The Chomsky-Foucault Debates on Human Nature and I picked it up. The Foucault stuff struck me as tediously outdated—who on earth still cares about the Marxist-Leninist view of something?—but Chomsky struck me as outdated too, just not tediously so.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. The reprinted material was new in the 1970s. But these people are supposed to be talking about human nature, which hasn’t changed much in the past 30 years. Chomsky himself points out there has been “virtually no theoretical progress” in our understanding of human nature since Aristotle’s day, so if we can still read Thucydides for a good portrait of human nature, why can’t we read Chomsky-Foucault as well? It is not so easy to produce a classic text, even when addressing a classic theme.